tied together with a smile
by thelilacfield
Summary: Her smile was the one thing that held her together. Like Icarus, she flew too near the sun.


Thanks to my brilliant friends Naomi, Princess and Owly for these incredible prompts: _"I can't believe you!", reckless, headstrong, bouquet of dandelions, masks, rain, white roses, try not to think, spoilt brat, simple, empty, nightmares_.

This is also a, albeit late, birthday fic for Rachel! Happy birthday, darling and I hope it was amazing :D

**Warning: **This fic contains allusions to self-harm and suicide.

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><p><span>tied together with a smile<span>

Her smile was the one thing that held her together.

When it left, she fell to nothing.

…

She lifted up his spirit and made him feel the warmth of the sun's rays. She kissed him and brought him back to life in a glorious climax. She touched him with passion and awoke the lion that lay dormant within him.

The first time he saw the scars was as muted sunlight filtered through broken blinds to illuminate a dusty room, strewn with books and clothes discarded in crumpled heaps.

She rolled over, the sheets bunched around her waist and he saw the raised white lines criss-crossing her ankle in what seemed to be a planned pattern.

She never mentioned it, so neither did he.

He'd arrive at her flat with a bouquet of dandelions every Friday night without fail. They'd eat together and laugh together and inevitably end up in bed _together_.

And every time he noticed more of those scars.

They started spreading up her leg, until every inch of her skin from her ankle to her calf was strewn with those scars.

Three months after he first noticed the scars, the first one appeared on her wrist, vivid, red and raw.

She offered excuses, fabricated fantasies of tripping up staircases, scratching cats and clumsy falls. He never believed any of them.

She was graceful, balanced, had a knack of always landing on her feet and was allergic to cats.

She became distant, cold when he tried to show her warmth. He looked into her eyes and found out terrible things. Her eyes were empty, a void in the dead white of her face.

Her kisses grew infrequent and she never liked him to see her less than fully clothed. He caught her pulling on a dress for a night out and was horrified by how skinny she was, every knob of her spine looking as if about to break through her paper-thin skin.

The shock of his life came when he decided to surprise her with a bunch of forget-me-nots and a box of chocolates one evening. He walked in on her in just her underwear.

But it wasn't her desperate thinness or the mascara stains on her cheeks that scared him. It was her hair and her back.

He'd always seen her with long sunshine-golden hair, a happy little sunbeam dancing through the days. Now her hair was black as night and chopped short, piles of hair strewn over the floor.

And spread across the once-flawless white skin of her back was a pair of black wings, like a fallen angel's.

He stared at her in horror, at the happy, shining, beautiful fairy he fell in love transformed into this tear-stained, scarred, skeletal fallen angel.

He caught sight of the scars on her leg and a new one on her arm, blood staining the skin and he couldn't understand _why_.

Her eyes were dead, no emotion or warmth or even cold in their amber depths. She reached up to ruffle her hair self-consciously when she caught him staring. The mascara stains painted on her cheeks glared out at him.

She reached out a tiny hand to him, her slim fingers trembling and silver swirls adorning nails painted as black as her hair. He took it, turning her hand over in his to examine the lines etched into her palm.

Another tattoo swirled along her wrist, a phrase written in perfect filigree: _this too shall come to pass_.

She smiled then, tentatively, and he could feel himself falling back into her, the sun the shines in his world. He delicately traced the words on her wrist with one finger, feeling how cold her skin was.

He drew her slowly towards him, his hands meshing through the short midnight strands atop her shining face. He kissed her, the heady scent of her taking him over, pulling him in. His hands traced the lines of the fallen angel wings on her back and for a moment there was nothing but them.

The mascara stains continued to bloom on her cheeks, her eyes remained empty and her whole self remained paper-thin. She hid the tattoos behind baggy jumpers and long sleeves.

His nickname for her shifted from _sunbeam _to _raven_. The layered feathers crowning her head, the wings she had and how she wished so fervently to fly composed the nickname for him.

He felt the ghost of her shaking fingers on his skin every night, the invisible kisses on his neck, the mirage of her tremulous smile behind his eyes.

He saw her breaking and falling to dust. He wrapped his arms tightly around her in futile attempts to hold her together, whispered words to build her up once more.

He saw her behind the masks, the sweet smile and fresh face and bubbly giggles. He saw how she collapsed, falling. He tried to always be around to catch her.

He tried not to notice when he saw the scars on her thigh, the white lines shaped into wings of glass. He pretended that her skin wasn't marred in this way, that she was still his flawless, headstrong, reckless love.

But she wasn't that same dancing sunbeam any more. She was a skeleton, crying black tears and failing to fly on dark wings.

He'd always thought their love would be simple, to one day lie with her under sunshine in their house with a white picket fence and their generic two-point-four children.

But he found that it was anything but simple when she fell from heaven and lost her angel wings on the way down.

The rain kissed his skin lightly when he delivered flowers and loving smiles to her door. She opened the door with those foreboding black stains on her pronounced cheekbones and the smell of blood lingering around her.

He lost control. The fire burst out of him in a terrible tirade of insults, venomous words like _spoilt brat _and _I can't believe you_. He stormed away, leaving her crying shards of glass into the night and softly whispering his name with shallow breaths.

He returned the next day, a tangle of regrets. An unidentifiable stench lingered on the air, one that made him want to turn and run.

He found her in the bedroom, appearing to be in a deep slumber. He called her name, crossed the carpet and touched her shoulder, shaking her gently.

He saw the smashed glass littered like lethal frost across the carpet, the white roses he'd gifted her scattered across the furniture, petals ripped from them and lying across the bed.

He prayed that it was a nightmare as his eyes travelled up her body, her rigid limbs, the pallor of her skin, her hair very dark above her white face, the bruised purple of her closed eyelids.

He caught sight of her arm and let out an unbidden moan. The tattoo that had reassured him that his love was still there beneath the hair-dye and black tears (_this too shall come to pass_) was gone.

In its place was the same words, carved in crimson blood. Her fingers were still wrapped around a shard of mirror.

And he realised what the stench was.

{_Death_}

He fell sideways, overpowered by the stench of burning wax.

Because she'd tried to fly, to leave behind the wreck of a life.

And, like Icarus, she'd flown too near the sun.

And she'd fallen.

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><p>I hope you enjoyed this.<p>

Please do not favourite without reviewing, thank you :)


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